Photos

Excited to share our first video update of 2015!
As we said at the beginning of this year: we are making a consciousness shift to raise the bar of Pantheon's visual quality, while not compromising performance. We have put a great amount of energy and research into making the Unity Engine give us everything it's got! We've purposely not shown much of the game during this time until some of these visual overhauls had been completed and streamlined. Now we're ready to share some of the fruit of this work in today's update. This video is focused on highlighting our new World Building and Environmental Art workflow, and the visual improvements of this new pipeline.
This video is meant to be fairly concise and informative - we hope you enjoy it!

Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen is a High Fantasy themed Massively Multiplayer Role Playing game (MMORPG) with a heavy focus on character development, an immersive world, and player interdependence (grouping). It is being developed by Visionary Realms, Inc., a lean and mean volunteer team. We are targeting a ‘niche’ audience who wants more of a challenge, with a mixture of classic MMO mechanics and modern ideas.
By keeping costs down and by using previous MMO development experience, we don’t believe we need 10s or 100s of millions of dollars to complete this game. We have relied completely on crowdfunding since the game’s inception, but our hope is to raise money from accredited investors soon.

If you can help us in crowdfunding, please go to www.pantheonrotf.com to view the different pledge tiers.
You can also send us money directly via paypal: paypal@pantheonrotf.com
Crowdfunding income is used to purchase and maintain software (such as Unity) as well as to help out the volunteers we have, primarily those who don’t have a day job and work 8-12 hours on this project every day of the week. We hope by releasing these videos of our progress every 1-2 months we can reassure the community that Pantheon is indeed a serious MMO in development and making clear and measurable forward progress. To that end, we certainly appreciate any donations or pledges you can make. That said, if times are tough, at least join the community and learn about the game – we think you’ll like what you see.

If you are an accredited investor or know of one who might be interested in helping fund this project, please email Brad McQuaid at brad@pantheonrotf.com . We have a complete Business Plan put together and can make it available to interested parties.

Check out the forward progress by comparing to last month's video -- we are in full production mode! Please continue to support us if possible: paypal@pantheonrotf.com
Also, look at the gameplay going on in the chat window -- combat is there, spells, buffs, cool downs, auto-attack, etc. The gameplay depicted in the chat window will always be ahead of the graphics and UI depicting that gameplay (by design).

Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen is a High Fantasy themed Massively Multiplayer Role Playing game (MMORPG) with a heavy focus on character development, an immersive world, and player interdependence (grouping). It is being developed by Visionary Realms, Inc., a lean and mean volunteer team. We are targeting a ‘niche’ audience who wants more of a challenge, with a mixture of classic MMO mechanics and modern ideas.

By keeping costs down and by using previous MMO development experience, we don’t believe we need 10s or 100s of millions of dollars to complete this game. We have relied completely on crowdfunding since the game’s inception, but our hope is to raise money from accredited investors soon.

If you can help us in crowdfunding, please go to www.pantheonrotf.com to view the different pledge tiers.

You can also send us money directly via paypal: paypal@pantheonrotf.com

Crowdfunding income is used to purchase and maintain software (such as Unity) as well as to help out the volunteers we have, primarily those who don’t have a day job and work 8-12 hours on this project every day of the week. We hope by releasing these videos of our progress every 1-2 months we can reassure the community that Pantheon is indeed a serious MMO in development and making clear and measurable forward progress. To that end, we certainly appreciate any donations or pledges you can make. That said, if times are tough, at least join the community and learn about the game – we think you’ll like what you see.

If you are an accredited investor or know of one who might be interested in helping fund this project, please email Brad McQuaid at brad@pantheonrotf.com . We have a complete Business Plan put together and can make it available to interested parties.

Make sure you set youtube to 1080p. Check out the forward progress by comparing to last month's video -- we are in full production mode! More videos to come this month as well. Let us know what you think! Please continue to support us if possible: paypal@pantheonrotf.com

Also, look at the gameplay going on in the chat window -- combat is there, spells, buffs, cool downs, auto-attack, etc. The gameplay depicted in the chat window will always be ahead of the graphics and UI depicting that gameplay (by design).

Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen is a High Fantasy themed Massively Multiplayer Role Playing game (MMORPG) with a heavy focus on character development, an immersive world, and player interdependence (grouping). It is being developed by Visionary Realms, Inc., a lean and mean volunteer team. We are targeting a ‘niche’ audience who wants more of a challenge, with a mixture of classic MMO mechanics and modern ideas.

By keeping costs down and by using previous MMO development experience, we don’t believe we need 10s or 100s of millions of dollars to complete this game. We have relied completely on crowdfunding since the game’s inception, but our hope is to raise money from accredited investors soon.
If you can help us in crowdfunding, please go to www.pantheonrotf.com to view the different pledge tiers. You can also send us money directly via paypal: paypal@pantheonrotf.com

Crowdfunding income is used to purchase and maintain software (such as Unity) as well as to help out the volunteers we have, primarily those who don’t have a day job and work 8-12 hours on this project every day of the week. We hope by releasing these videos of our progress every 1-2 months we can reassure the community that Pantheon is indeed a serious MMO in development and making clear and measurable forward progress. To that end, we certainly appreciate any donations or pledges you can make. That said, if times are tough, at least join the community and learn about the game – we think you’ll like what you see.

If you are an accredited investor or know of one who might be interested in helping fund this project, please email Brad McQuaid at brad@pantheonrotf.com . We have a complete Business Plan put together and can make it available to interested parties.

Please read the following and help us out with donations and pledges on www.pantheonrotf.com -- thank you!

Pantheon Update!

Building up the team continues to be a very successful endeavor. We have more talented people willing to help out and dedicate themselves to the project than I would have ever imagined. We continue to be a bit overwhelmed, but this is a good problem to have. As you can see from the team roster (below), critical positions are being filled.

We are back in full development mode. The programmers have assimilated the project and are both cleaning things up and beginning work on the client/server network code. Laurene & I are getting daily (and even more frequently) builds. The Lore team is meeting tomorrow to work on the initial continent and to begin laying out where the various zones, outdoors, cities, and dungeons are going to be. The big challenge right now is ‘how big should a zone be?’ Unity is allowing us to create absolutely huge zones right now, but we need to scale that back a little bit. We need to make sure the servers can handle all of the mobs in a zone as well as a bunch of players who decide to meet in one area.

The Programmer’s efforts with the new network code are essential. Within 1-2 weeks we will be able to (internally) create accounts, create characters, and then log into one of the game’s zones. This requires the client to be able to connect to the servers, and the server code to be able to talk to the database. The good news is that we had some of this working before, so we can reference that.

We also want to make a commitment to all of you in the Pantheon community. We will be doing weekly updates to www.pantheonrotf.com and Pantheon’s Facebook page. It will likely be mostly small updates, but we feel we owe it to you all to keep you up to date and able to watch our progress. One week it may just be a few new screenshots, where other weeks we may be able to share something more significant. The important thing, I think, is consistently updating you so you can see measurable forward progress, even if the update isn’t a huge deal each and every time.

Ok, here comes the plug: crowd-funding has predictably died down since a few weeks after we launched www.pantheonrotf.com. This was expected, but we still do need your help, especially with full development underway again. With the weekly updates so you can monitor our progress, our hope is that some of you will be able to send some more money our way. In addition to paying the volunteer team as much as possible, we are at a point now where we need to buy hardware & software. One of our team members has fiber to their house, so we won’t need to rent out server racks for quite a while during pre-alpha. But that does mean we need to purchase a couple of computer servers. We also have licensing costs, like Unity. We are also interviewing character artists, and once they are brought on board they will need licenses to Photoshop, Maya, and other art programs, as well as drawing tablets (likely Wacom Cintiqs or similar). The programmers also have some software they need (thank you BizSpark!), and we continue to download assets and packages from the Unity store to save us time and make sure nobody on the team is gated.

Regardless of whether you can help out financially, we deeply appreciate your interest in Pantheon and your desire to be part of our growing community. You can help the project grow by sharing the screenshots we post and talking about our progress to your friends and posting about Pantheon in social media. We are also making some changes to the website and opening up at least one forum that will be accessible to all, not just subscribers. Becoming an Apprentice Developer still has a monthly fee associated with it, but we’re going to try out an open forum and see how that goes.

If you can help out, please head to www.pantheonrotf.com and make a donation or add to an existing donation. Doing so will help us get this project to the next stage we are calling pre-alpha. The idea behind pre-alpha is to be able to show the community and potential investors the progress we’ve made with this new team. It’s important to everyone that there is measurable forward progress and that the team is working hard and producing some exciting results. Once we can internally create accounts and log into a server that is always up, we can then also return to combat and start refining and tuning it. Then comes inventory, grouping, etc.

Also, if you somehow missed it, we posted a metric ton of screenshots and a quickie movie a few weeks back at https://www.facebook.com/pantheonrotf . This was long over due and is meant to show all of you the progress we made since October or so of last year. We’re still working on 1-2 more movies (these ones a little more professional) that we’ll post soon. The great news is that now, going forward, we have a foundation the developers can build upon, and we have more people involved in the project. This should mean some exciting progress depicted in our weekly updates!

Ultimately, the most important thing from a community standpoint is that we consistently reveal this weekly progress and give you all increased confidence that Pantheon is alive and well and moving forward!

Thanks,

-Brad “Aradune” McQuaid

6/3/2014

p.s. We are looking for several positions that will be revealed soon. One of those positions is a CEO. I want to focus on being Chief Creative Officer, involved with design and the overall Vision of the game. I don’t want to run the company day by day if at all possible, bogged down by the business side of things. We have sent out a few emails to people we are interested in recruiting for this role, but are also interested in opening the door to other applicants until the right person for this very sensitive and important role is found. If you have anybody you know who might be both qualified and interested, please email me at brad@pantheonrotf.com.